Lesson #1: A man, even titled and handsome, cannot be careless forever.

The Earl of Marsden—better known as Mars to all—has lived his life by his own rules…until he is presented with a very big problem in a very tiny package—a baby girl, his daughter cast off by his ex-mistress. Mars won’t let his child be cast adrift, except he doesn’t know the first thing about babies.

Panicking, he turns to a woman for help. Not just any woman, but Clarissa Taylor, village spinster, matron-in-training, and Mars’s greatest critic. Still, who better to tend a motherless child than a woman who was abandoned as a babe herself?

Lesson #2: Life always plays the upper hand—especially when it comes to love. 

Clarissa desperately wishes to not to be beholden to anyone. She has spent a lifetime being pitied by the village. Her plan is simple—to use what the intolerable earl will pay her to become her own woman. It all sounds so straightforward until the threat of scandal sends her and the one man she can’t abide toward . . . marriage?

Mars and Clarissa are about to learn the greatest lesson of all—that sparks always fly when the iron is hot.